About the project
Push hyperelastic materials to their limits and measure their response to harsh environmental conditions. This project develops non-contact, full-field experiments (DIC and infra-red thermography) to capture deformation and heating during extreme strain-rates and temperatures, creating gold-standard datasets to calibrate advanced hyperelastic/viscoelastic models and enable more reliable engineering simulations.
This project will build and validate a new generation of high-fidelity experiments that capture the full, nonlinear deformation (and, where possible, temperature rise) of polymers under extreme conditions. You’ll combine non-contact full-field tools, Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and infra-red thermography, with carefully designed standard and non-standard tests to create modern, information-rich datasets for robust calibration and validation of hyperelastic/viscoelastic constitutive models (including inverse approaches such as inverse FEM and the Virtual Fields Method). Along the way you’ll tackle real experimental challenges: gripping compliant specimens at high loading rates, keeping high-quality speckle patterns at very large strains, and balancing field of view with resolution.
Working at temperature extremes adds further complexity, from fixture redesign for thermal contraction/embrittlement to avoiding slippage and optical disturbances from environmental chamber windows and cryogenic flow (including moisture/frost). The Testing and Structures Research Laboratory (TSRL) offers an exceptional platform: quasi-static and extreme-temperature testing, an Instron Very High Speed 80/20 servo-hydraulic machine (up to 20 m/s) for like-for-like strain-rate comparisons, and a drop-weight impact system with an environmental chamber for combined impact and thermal conditioning. The outcome will be a set of repeatable, data-rich experiments that unlock more reliable simulation of polymers in harsh engineering environments.
